Reading Writers You Can’t Stand

Over at the New Yorker Maria Bustillos has a nice reflection on reading writers she can’t stand — or that’s how she describes her topic, though I think she’s actually conflating different kinds of reading experience. She begins by claiming, rightly, that “the sensual delight of reading good writing, all by itself . . . is in no way dependent on agreement with the author; consider that it may be possible to find a writer’s work gorgeous even when he is saying something plain awful. There are a number of authors who have this effect on me; for example, I love Evelyn Waugh a lot, though he was a terrific snob and mean as a snake—qualities as evident in his work as they are said to have been in his life.”

Already I think Bustillos is making two very different points. The first is that we can enjoy writing whose point or purpose we disagree with if it’s beautifully written; the second is that we can enjoy writers who are terrible people. Those are different points because terrible people can not only write well, they can also say things that are true. And, to make matters still more complex, truth and falsehood can be mixed in a single poem or story or essay. We can find ourselves switching between deep sympathy and utter alienation.

The most interesting part of Bustillos’s essay is her description of what it’s like for her, as a 21st century American liberal woman, to read Edmund Burke:

I will never be entirely persuaded of his message, but the skill and beauty of his rhetoric have opened the door to many insights for me…. It’s like the most beautiful voice you ever heard, singing a song you can’t stand. There are moments in Burke — many of them — where even a dyed-in-the-wool political liberal can’t help feeling the romantic tug of his arguments: how a modern woman is to approach the old idea of chivalry, for example. He makes this idea sound very beautiful; I find I can’t quite dismiss it out of hand. Complexities are introduced — shades of grey, areas to investigate further.

Reading this passage, I think, “But Burke isn’t really ‘singing a song you can’t stand,’ is he? He’s singing a song you couldn’t stand at first but you are now beginning to appreciate the artfulness of, even if it’s still not quite your thing.” But, no that isn’t quite right, because Bustillos’s response to Burke isn’t purely aesthetic: the beauty of Burke’s language is sufficient to create in her at least partial sympathy with his actual arguments. She’s not “entirely persuaded” — but not utterly alienated either. She “can’t quite dismiss” even Burke’s deep commitment to chivalry “out of hand”: she’s going “to investigate further.”

Her conclusion is lovely:

That we have the means of doing this — of entering into another mind to find all the riches and the perils that may await us there — affords us the possibility of deep pleasure and understanding. Without the ability to travel outside ourselves, all our conversations are in danger of becoming like tennis games consisting entirely of serves, with never a rally in sight. This is a matter of comprehending and containing the trick of beautiful rhetoric, experiencing the workings of a mind entirely unlike your own.

But I want to add even to this commendation a gentle disagreement, because these are not minds “entirely unlike your own,” are they? The beauty of their writing has drawn Bustillos in, and once drawn in, she began to realize that those minds are more like her own than she had previous suspected — that their thoughts are not as alien to her thoughts as our daily political and social discourse would lead us to believe. And that’s one of the most wonderful things about reading.

Goldsmith and Burke, Swift and the Bishop of Cloyne
All hated Whiggery; but what is Whiggery?A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind
That never looked out of the eye of a saint
Or out of drunkard’s eye.
The Seventh. All’s Whiggery now,
But we old men are massed against the world.The First. American colonies, Ireland, France and India
Harried, and Burke’s great melody against it.

To read Larison on Rubin, or Dreher’s latest silliness on religious freedom, it is well worth remembering how not look “out of the eye of a saint”.

It was Burke’s Great Melody, and Connor Cruise O’Brien’s biography, that forever turned from Rousseau’s dangerous, and infectious, romanticism into the heart of Burke’s “whiggery”: a liberal ethos in conservative garb.

An excellent post: thanks to Ms. Bustillos for raising the topic, and thanks to you for refining and clarifying her observations. (I agree with her in particular about Edmund Burke, who has a similar affect on me, as does Adam Smith.) I make a point of reading authors with whom I expect to disagree (that’s why I read TAC); it challenges my preconceptions, opens my mind just the least bit, helps me sharpen my own thinking, , and reminds me that equally intelligent and equally well-meaning people can disagree. It also reminds me that, god forbid, I might actually sometimes be wrong.

One of the most meaningful courses I have taken was a course entirely on Wittgenstein’s later work. At the time I had nothing but antipathy for the school of thought seeded by W’s later work, but the genius and creativity of the work was something I could not simply dismiss. For those who do not recognize the reference, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is known for extremely creative and illustrative illustrations of what he termed “language games,” all of which stretch crude notions of linguistic meaning. By the time I finished the text, I had entirely renovated my philosophical outlook.

So I would note that florid prose is not the only way to do this; any bit of brilliance should be able to engage some who were prejudicially opposed to a view.

For me, the writer that comes to mind in this context is H.P. Lovecraft. I think he was without question one of the great imaginative geniuses of the 20th century. But I’ve never been able to warm to his imaginative vision, nor read his stories without a deep sense of disturbed dread and unease. (But no doubt he would be quite happy at producing that effect in a reader!) Somewhere Chesterton talks about the difference between making the flesh crawl and making the soul crawl, and Lovecraft was all about making the soul crawl. For me, what Lovecraft’s stories lack is a humanizing element like Ben Mears in Salem’s Lot. I certainly enjoyed Salem’s Lot more than I did The Dunwich Horror, but at the same time I felt it necessary I read The Dunwich Horror.

‘Modernist’ is defined by this writer as “personal detachment from the issues under discussion,” the separation of participants’ personal identities from subjects of inquiry and topics of debate;

‘Postmodern’ as “persons and positions are ordinarily closely related,” with little insistence on keeping personal identity separate from the questions or issues under discussion;

What jumps out at me is that Ms. Bustillos, who appears very young, is nevertheless confident enough of her scope of knowledge and understanding of the world to proclaim that ‘she will never be entirely persuaded of [Burke's] message.’ Though it is fine to debate a point vigorously, such certitude from a less than lengthy exposure to life is something one used to rarely hear expressed by young people. Now you hear it all the time and I suspect it relates to the described merger of discourse/positions and personality described above as post-modern.

Re “Curle” and the “certitude” one “used to rarely hear expressed by young people”: that’s not how I remember being young. I’m in my sixties, and if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that I was a lot more sure about a lot more things forty or fifty years ago. Of course, since I’m in my sixties, my memories of my youth may be inaccurate–I’m really not sure. See what I mean?

My own experience, for what that’s worth, is that epistemic closure isn’t an age-specific phenomenon. The certainties of youth and the certainties of age may be different in content, but not so much in character.